28 | A 5-minute process to turn a prompt into chatbot

Over the past 4 years with using AI,

and especially in the last 12 months,

I've found certain prompts I love to return to again and again.

And while I tried using notes apps, prompt library tools, all sorts of ways to store my prompts...

Every single one left me annoyed.

Annoyed because: copying and pasting.

Then my friend Michael Greenberg told me about a trick they use at his AI automation agency.

Turn a prompt into a 1-prompt chatbot.

It's super easy, and it allows you to run your prompt with all sorts of different inputs as many times as you want.

And the best part?

No copying and pasting (well, except the very first time when you set it up).

So, today we're gonna roll a bit differently.

Instead of taking a framework and turning it into a prompt, we're gonna take a prompt and turn it into a bot.

A bot that's super easy to access and run any AI prompt you have whenever you want.

The coolest part is that these bots take <5 minutes to make, and they're free to use as long as you don't need GPT-4 to run them.

Let me show you how.

About 1-Prompt Chatbots

When you think of chatbots, you most likely think of experiences of bots that are programmed to talk like a certain person, have a fun personality, or maybe handle customer service.

1-Prompt bots are a different kind of tool.

They're technically chatbots because you use a chat interface, but they're really more like filling in a form, pressing submit, and getting a result.

Because they're so simple to make, I think 1-prompt bots don't get much hype. But they're actually really useful if you have prompts you like to use even semi-often.

The business case for bots

When Erica Schneider and I released our Hooked on Writing Hooks with AI course bundle, it came with a bunch of prompts to help you write scroll-stopping hooks for social media posts. Each prompt was based on one of Erica's frameworks.

(Erica is a legendary writer/editor/creator.)

Even though many fans said the prompts were their favorite part — it made it really easy to apply the course concepts to their specific content needs — a lot of people didn't actually use them.

Why? Because you had to copy and paste those prompts from the course.

It was an annoying, high-friction activity to take while also reading, watching videos, and learning something.

After talking with Michael about 1-prompt Bots, I decided to put every single prompt into its own chatbot.

I posted those into the course.

Suddenly people were using the bots (and the prompts) like crazy.

I was actually proud to be hitting $5-10 a day in OpenAI charges to run those bots because I knew that people were getting a ton of value from them.

So from now on, I think everything I do will come with bots.

And if AI prompts are part of your business, I suggest you consider doing this too.

BUT — I'd rather not have to pay for everything moving forward. And if you're thinking about doing this for your customers/clients/friends/self — you might not want to pay either.

Which is why we're going to use Poe.com.

Before we go on…

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The deal with Poe

Here's the deal with Poe and how it makes bots free.

You have ~unlimited access to talk to a bunch of lighter, faster AIs/LLMs like ChatGPT-3.5 and Claude Instant.

And for free you can run 5 queries a day with Claude-2-100k, the next-best model versus GPT-4.

And if you want, pay $20 to get access to GPT-4, more Claude-2, and a bunch of other perks.

(If you're thinking about comparing ChatGPT Pro and Poe Pro: Poe costs about the same as ChatGPT, gives you access to more models, but it doesn't give you cool beta features like Plug-Ins, DALLE-3, and Advanced Data Analysis.)

The bottom line with Poe?

Many prompts work great in 3.5 or Claude Instant. Make bots with those.

Put your monster prompts into Claude-2 and see if they work. Then you can run 5 a day if you want.

And if you want to make legions of GPT-4 bots with megaprompts that are more Rob style, it's gonna cost you about the price of 5 coffees at Starbucks a month... for at least a 5-coffee increase in your productivity and business value.

Adapting your prompt for a chatbot

For our example, we'll use a prompt from a previous issue of this newsletter.

3 months ago, I wrote about Alex Hormozi's C.L.O.S.E.R. framework and included two megaprompts.

One I called the Sales Cheatsheet Maker.

This prompt outlines all the elements of Hormozi's framework for something you want to sell. I heard that in addition to using it to prep for live sales calls, people were using it to write emails, landing pages, and just to understand their customers better.

This prompt got a lot of use, so let's make a bot out of it.

STEPS:

The first part of my prompt requires the user to put their "offer":

MY OFFER=

A course on using AI to generate content called Content Reactor

TASK=You are CLOSER-BOT, and your role is to help me use Alex Hormozi's C.L.O.S.E.R. framework to win more business....

To prep this prompt to become a 1-Prompt chatbot, we need to replace the fill-in-your-information-here part with something an AI can understand..

So take that offer (the placeholder is for my course Content Reactor) and change it out with "{User input}". This tells the bot to take whatever the user says and put it in there.

MY OFFER=

{User input}

TASK=You are CLOSER-BOT, and your role is to help me use Alex Hormozi's C.L.O.S.E.R. framework...

Easy enough, right.

And that's basically all we need to do to be ready.

Go to Poe.com and we're gonna build a bot. Create a log in if you don't have one.

Once in Poe, you'll see all the various normal language models you can talk to. Find the Create Bot button to make your own bot.

You can give your bot a name and picture if you want.

Next, under Bot behavior, we just need to pick our language model.

For a megaprompt like C.L.O.S.E.R. we could try regular ChatGPT, but I think Claude-2-100k is going to work best.

Paste in your modified {User input} prompt into the Prompt section.

Here you can also decide if you want people to be able to see the prompt. You can share a bot but keep your special prompt a secret if you want.

Use the Greeting message to tell the user what to do to make your bot work.

Bot profile is optional, but if you want people to discover your bot in the Poe bot listings, and/or if you want to promote yourself, include it here.

Lastly, you can choose if you want your bot to be available to the public.

I have pre-launch access to bot monetization which I'm not sure if you'll also see.

Click "Create bot".

Et, voila!

I know it was a lot of steps. But — it probably took longer to read this email than it would have for you to set up your own bot.

And that's it.

Now you have easy access to a bot that'll just run that prompt for you whenever you feel like it.

See this whole output for a dog grooming business here.

Wrapping Up

Taking the prompts from my course with Erica and turning them into bots was an easy win for my customers. But it also taught me how easy it can be to earn those wins for myself.

If you're looking to systematize and automate parts of your work, a few 1-prompt chatbots will get you far in just a few minutes.

And if you want to try out the bot I demoed in this email, you can find CLOSER-bot here.

—Rob Lennon
@thatroblennon

PS - Don't forget to join me, Erica, Kasey, Justin, Jay, and all the others in Platform Launchpad. You only have until Sunday, Nov 5 to get in on this epic cohort.